I would probably recommend it to my mom, but not my twelve-year-old nephew. Yet.
Perfect parameter description! You have recommended to your mountain biking mom, anyway. = ]
Thanks for the link, Ookla. Very nice taste of good things to enjoy on the cold, rainy days to come on the Central Coast of CA.
Scenes of rape, incest, torture, murder, etc . . . are a part of real life, unfortunately, and are often integral to the heroic story line. When do they cross that sometimes-movable line into the disgusting, gratuitous, morbidly obsessive? When is it acceptable and when is it just a bit too much?
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay is pushing its limits for me right now. I'm going to have to clean my brain a bit after this. The lust-deranged Alienor of Castle Borzo is, to me, a gratuitous character. Maybe there will be consequences for her behavior, but she is written with far too free a hand s far and those of us whose parents suffered the real consequences of the free-love late sixties and seventies cannot read a scenario like this without (yet more) eye-rolling. Pleeez.
But the story and characters keep me reading. I am glad that I can hopefully trust other of Kay's works, so sez Miss Silk. He also gets lost in "saying rather than showing" all too often. But his characters' thoughts and motivations ring true and his voice of inspiration is obvious. By inspiration, I mean that indefinable quality of the author's connection with his/her muse; when the story writes itself and teaches the author something he/she did not know, when things are just simply amazing and winsome . . . you know what I mean. We know it when we read it, anyway.
Going to read Bookstore Guy's review site today, especially for the new EE Knight book.